Artist loves chanciness / She creates paper, adding found objects

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 3, 2002

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers from her garden and materials from friends. She is looking at paper she just made for a transformation comic.
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers from her garden and materials from friends. She is looking at paper she just made for a transformation comic.
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Photo: LIZ HAFALIA

Image 2 of 3

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers materials from friends for paper making. This is a spirit portrait called "Final Fish of the West".
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers materials from friends for paper making. This is a spirit portrait called "Final Fish of the West".
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Photo: LIZ HAFALIA

Image 3 of 3

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers from her garden and materials from friends. She will use these for cards.
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Artist Linda Lemons uses flowers from her garden and materials from friends. She will use these for cards.
(PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ HAFALIA/THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Photo: LIZ HAFALIA

Artist loves chanciness / She creates paper, adding found objects

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What happens when you surrender control of the artistic process, letting randomness determine the outcome? If painters wore blindfolds and allowed their brushes to guide them, they would likely end up with unsalable squiggles and mounting frustration.

But Oakland artist Linda Lemon, 49, enjoys chanciness. When she creates works from handmade paper and mixed media, control is the last thing she's after.

"I don't set out to do a piece about something," she says. "I feel like my task is to get out of the way, rather than to direct (the process). I don't direct it. It directs me."

Even if she tried, she couldn't really control the results, because handmade papermaking is largely blind. Like someone panning for gold in a murky river, Lemon submerges a screened tray into a warm bath filled with paper pulp and lifts a sheet of mush.

She deposits this onto a blotter and sculpts the page as it dries, pressing down in select places to create a fascinating topography -- a process she likens to making mud pies.

Then she plays with color. Using watercolors on the still-wet sheet and affixing found objects like maroon abutilon petals, she delights in how the paints and petals bleed their hues. With this approach, you pretty much get what you get.

"It's really different from sitting down with a piece of paper and making a drawing. That's so direct! Whereas making paper is very indirect. And I like that," said Lemon.

Despite these inauspicious circumstances, Lemon has created a significant body of work, ranging from representational pieces like "Bird of Paradise," a portrait of a savvy green-and-blue hawk, to nonrepresentational pieces like "Eye of the Storm," which showcases a peacock feather.

"What distinguishes my work," she says, "is it's not handmade paper as an end in itself. It's a vehicle to get somewhere completely different."

Lemon came up with this personal twist on papermaking after a 16-year lapse in artistic pursuits. Although galleries displayed her printmaking as early as 1975, culminating in a 1979 etchings exhibit at the Palace of Arts and Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and although she earned a Bachelor of Arts in art from Cal State Hayward in 1980, Lemon subsequently ignored her artistic side. Instead she did marketing research for two firms and focused on domestic life.

Then, in 1996, after playing with a Nature Company papermaking kit that she received for Christmas, she fell in love with the medium and taught herself everything she needed to know.

"I felt like I was starting over," she recalls. And yet it also seemed like "I'd been making art all along. I just started right in as if I hadn't ever stopped. I had matured as an artist while not being a working artist."

By 1997 she began showing her paper creations, and they have since appeared throughout the Bay Area. Oakland's Ardency Gallery kicked off the year with a monthlong show of Lemon's work. Pro Arts is displaying "Bird of Paradise" in a six-week preview of the East Bay Open Studios, which occur the first two weekends in June.

"Part of its charm is that you want to handle it," Ramirez said. Then, too, she respects the artistry: "It's very painterly in a way that you wouldn't expect, because she pays close attention to color and composition."

VERVE UNDERNEATH HER CALM

Bursting onto the scene as Lemon has requires not only talent but also verve. And Lemon has passion in spades, though she initially comes across as a quiet, calm Earth Mother, down to her comforting breadth and long shag of silvery hair.

In the same vein, when she leads papermaking workshops in her garage-turned- studio, her gentle, nurturing presence helps students take wing.

"That red fabric you've used is wonderful!" she might say. "The stripiness really comes out in your piece. Now what you might want to do is frame this one and then make another with . . ."

This mentoring quality leaves a distinct impression on her workshop students. Biologist Nina Bailey says, "I'd go again, because she was very user- friendly. She didn't make you feel like, 'Oh, this person doesn't have any ideas.' " Bailey said she found Lemon encouraging, easy to be with and "sensitive to different people's aesthetic."

Two-time attendee Eileen Feldman, who has long worked with graphic arts, calls each workshop a real treat because Lemon takes students' work so seriously. "She really is there experiencing it with you and appreciating all the nuances of the paper with you."

In contrast to her soft, calm demeanor during those tutorials, Lemon becomes downright explosive as she reflects on her career as an artist. She sits in her rocking chair scratching the gray-and-white cat in her lap, her voice repeatedly rising with unexpected forcefulness.

"I spent my whole life running away from what I knew I was supposed to do. I spent my whole life! And being tormented about that!"

TRAGEDY STRIKES

In the past year, three tragedies have forced her to reconfigure her life. A neck injury laid her up for months, prompting her to lose her job. Then her sole biological child suffered a fatal heart attack at 31. Having conceived him at age 16 and having therefore grown up alongside him, Lemon considers him "the whole point of my life."

Afflicted by grief, she says, "Sometimes I don't even know how to get up in the morning."

In addition, she's plagued by doubts about her artistic ability, frequently thinking, "I'm not good enough. I don't know enough. (I'm) afraid. I can't support myself" through art alone.

"At least once a day, I'm like, 'God, what am I doing? I should go get a job, right?' But you know something?" -- Now she's practically screaming -- "I can't! At this point in my life, I can't do it! I can't work at an office job. Not physically, not emotionally. So it's almost like I don't have much choice."

She says the losses have helped clarify her priorities. She knows she must commit to art, partly because of her son, who long functioned as her cattle prod. He'd say, "Mom, you know what you're supposed to be doing. Why are you doing this marketing research? Why aren't you doing what you're really good at?" In particular, she said he pushed her to lead workshops.

Since his death, Lemon has realized that dream.

"It has been a real eye-opener to watch what happens when I have people in the studio. It's almost like those movies (with) stop-action photography where a flower opens up right in front of your eyes."

She is also teaching papermaking in schools. These activities fit under the rubric of her mission, which she states without hesitating: "My overall mission is fostering creativity. And assisting others in the unfolding of potential. That's something I'm supposed to be doing in this particular lifetime. And I've come to a point in my own maturity where I'm actually able to start working with that."

Divination serves as another way for Lemon to fulfill her mission. While recuperating from her neck injury, she discovered that she could read playing cards, much as others read Tarot cards. She feels that her readings provide a great service.

"People want to have their inherent gifts fostered and given an opportunity to grow. People also want to be seen. They want to be recognized. That's one of the things I do when I read somebody's cards. It's like I look into them."

Divining seems as uncertain as making paper, but flying blind is Lemon's forte, especially because she doesn't feel unguided. She believes her unconscious mind directs whatever she does.

"My symbols, my mythologies, the content of my work (all) arise from the unconscious." Noting that water represents the unconscious and that fish swim in schools "without thinking about it," she says, "I feel like that's what I do in my life, that's what I do in my work, is move around in the unconscious without really knowing where I'm headed."

On display Pro Arts is displaying Linda Lemon's "Bird of Paradise" in a preview of the East Bay Open Studios, which occur the first two weekends in June, 461 Ninth St., Oakland. Linda Lemon can be reached at (510) 428-2915.

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